In this book, Alejandro Zambra takes us to Chile in the middle of the 1980s seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, exploring the need for a literature of children, of a perspective that challenges the official version of events. It speaks of the generation that learnt to read and draw while their parents became the victims or accomplices of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and describes their doubts, goals and how their lives are affected by the disquieting presence of a strange woman.